This Most Unexcellent Canopy, The Air

      My daughter lives in Los Angeles, where a on a September morning the sky should have been a clear light cerulean blue, the trees green, the air balmy. Here's a picture I took of her neighborhood last year:

     Here's a picture my daughter sent me of her neighborhood the other day at 9:55 am:

      The landscape has turned grey with a dull red sun that looks like a dying star. The air is noxious, one can feel it in one's lungs if one stays outside for very long. The children, still schooling at home because of the COVID-19 epidemic, now cannot even  go outside to play.  ​

       My sister lives in Portland, Oregon. A temperate rain forest, Portland is - was - a beautiful city of parks and pine trees bordered by mountains where plant life grows  so abundantly that it springs up through cracks in the sidewalk. And the air in Portland is - was - always so fresh and cool and clean.
        Here are some pictures I took while walking around my sister's neighborhood on a September day a few years ago:

     Here's a picture my sister took from the parking lot of her neighborhood grocery parking lot a few days ago:

​   At this moment Portland has the dirtiest, most hazardously caustic air of anywhere on earth. And though my sister has three air purifiers and her air conditioner running, she says the inside of her house smells like an ash tray. In spite of being an avid hiker, swimmer and outdoorswoman, my sister dares not tax her lungs with much physical work, even indoors.

      My daughter has lived in Los Angeles for 15 years; my sister has lived in Portland for close to two decades. Neither has experienced air events anything like what they're experiencing now. In fact it's only been within the past few year that the West Coast has been plagued by these episodes of an atmosphere so polluted by fire smoke that the air changes color, consistency, and smell and forces the population to stay indoors. This is because for the past few years - since 2018 - the American West Coast has suffered the worst wildfire seasons in history, with each year the fires progressively deadlier, more destructive, and producing more poisonous - and farther reaching - pollution of the air.
       But it's not only the West Coast suffering  the atmospheric fallout from the wildfires that have burned more than 5 million acres of land in the past two weeks. The foul smoke released from the wildfires has been picked up on the wind, the jet stream that travels across the continent and around the globe. By yesterday there was a haze over the sun in Chicago, Columbus, Ohio, and  Washington D.C. Based on satellite data, by this weekend that smokey air from the West Coast wildfires will be in the atmosphere of Europe . 

       And so people around the world will all be breathing in a greater or lesser amount of the same pollution born of monster fires born of global climate change that we human beings have caused and are now not doing enough to stop.  And all I can think about are the people I love breathing in that terrible air.                    

 References   
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/09/16/wildfire-smoke-reaches-europe/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_wildfires